After a whirlwind month of spewing racism, antisemitism and just straight oddities, Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, announced his intention to buy right-wing extremist “free speech” platform Parler.
Coincidentally, we’re sure, the app’s CEO is George Farmer, who is the husband of Kanye’s new best friend, conservative political pundit Candace Owens.
In announcing the deal yesterday, Parler’s parent company said that Kanye made “a groundbreaking move into the free speech media space and will never have to fear being removed from social media again.”
“The proposed acquisition will assure Parler a future role in creating an uncanceable ecosystem where all voices are welcome,” the company wrote in a statement. The deal is expected to close this upcoming quarter. The financial aspects of Kanye’s acquisition of Parler have not been disclosed.
In the past, billionaires and racists could just say whatever they wanted, knowing the class they wished to oppress wouldn’t call them out in fear of retaliation or harm.
These are not those days. With his agreement to buy Parler, Kanye represents yet another conservative billionaire attempting to wield control and influence over social media platforms, using the notion of free speech as a guise to continue fomenting hate speech and ginning up right-wing ideologues.
So what do you do when massive social media networks try to censor you? If you’re Elon Musk, you spend $44 billion on Twitter and enter into a yet-to-be-resolved legal duel for control over one of the most powerful platforms on Earth. If you’re former President Donald Trump, who was banned from Twitter after the January 6, 2021 insurrection, you build Truth Social. If you’re Peter Thiel, you fund the video site Rumble.
Kanye appears to have gone the Musk route and simply scooped up Parler with some spare change he had lying around.
“When I got kicked off of Instagram and Twitter at the time, I knew it was time to acquire my own platform,” Kanye told Bloomberg News. “People had talked about it and mentioned this idea for years, but enough was enough.”
In reality, he’s now joining the ranks of billionaires that are just funding their own echo chambers. These deals are more symbolic than financially brilliant. Innovation is a scapegoat. This is just another example of a man with money using his capital to skirt accountability for the consequences of his actions.
Kanye imagines himself as a beacon of free speech, a martyr of the left that canceled him for sharing what he says was his truth.
In actuality, Instagram and Twitter deleted a few posts after he went on extremely antisemitic tirades. For example, his Instagram account was temporarily frozen last week after he posted a screenshot of his text messages with business mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs, in which Kanye deployed an antisemitic trope, accusing Diddy of being controlled by “the Jewish people.”
He then posted a photo on Twitter of himself and Mark Zuckerberg, who is Jewish, lamenting about how they were once close. On cue, the presumptive buyer of Twitter, Elon Musk, replied to the photo, writing “Welcome back to Twitter, my friend.”
Shortly after, Kanye tweeted that he was sleepy, and when he awoke in the morning, he had plans to go “death [sic] con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.” That tweet was removed, too, naturally. Bloomberg reports Musk and Kanye spoke after that.
There is no need to rehash every single hate comment Kanye wrote these past few weeks. Just know that this all started after he designed and modeled a T-shirt emblazoned with “White Lives Matter” on the back, which is an expression defined as white supremacist hate speech by the Anti-Defamation League. He’s mad that people called him out and continue to do so. He’s incensed that people are holding him accountable for his words.
“We’re using this as a net for the people who have been bullied by the thought police to come and speak their mind,” Kanye continued to Bloomberg, adding he was planning to have dinner with Trump this week. He wants Trump on Parler and plans to join Truth Social, too.
“Express how you feel. Express what’s tied up inside of you. Express what’s been haunting you. I use social media as my therapist,” Kanye said.
Listen, we’re journalists, not doctors, though given Kanye’s very public struggles with mental illness, perhaps he needs to use a therapist as a therapist rather than public platforms containing the unfiltered thoughts of billions.
Kanye’s run to Parler is compounded by the fact that the app recently raised a $16 million Series B and acquired its own cloud service, meaning it has sole control over when it is online and offline. (Presumably a move that was decided after Amazon kicked Parler off its cloud service following the Capitol insurrection).
Kanye’s acquisition of the app doesn’t guarantee a mass of new users, however, because what is left of his fan base will also have to deal with the conservative natives of the platform.
And, anyway, more people watched Pete Davidson on “Saturday Night Live” than actually use the Parler app. Per data.ai, Parler averaged 6 million daily active users (DAUs) in the first half of 2021. In the same time period this year, the figure dropped below 1 million to 983,000.
Trump’s Truth Social, meanwhile, sees about 514,000 daily active users. To compare, Twitter estimates it has 237.8 million monetizable DAUs, while the Meta family of apps – which includes Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp — has 2.88 billion DAUs.
On Monday, online denizens began positing theories as to why Kanye would ever buy Parler. Some pondered whether Owens sought to become close friends with the rapper as a way to offload the app, given that it’s not as popular as its competitors. Others spoke of the attention economy and how conservative billionaires are aspiring for freedom of reach to “ensure their freedom will not be curtailed.” This is the beginning of something, though there are more questions than answers.
What is known for sure is that this is everything everywhere all at once. It’s a red herring, a dog whistle, a scapegoat and a gaslight; it’s a play on “innovation,” capitalism, the vulnerability of consumers who so desperately want to be Kanye West and the resilience of those who agree with the newly named Ye.
Though the future is uncertain, the now is known. For Kanye’s own ego, buying Parler makes sense. Any other way you look at it, it’s incomprehensibly stupid. But there is no way to get through to him or to people like that; they are unopposed and undeterred. Even Kanye said he doesn’t argue with people “broker than him,” about money.
So really, what do we know?
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